We posted about the SEPTA car on Fourth Avenue next to the Lyceum in Park Slope on Friday. It’s an odd landmark that is currently being hacked up, but it could have been saved according to GL readers. On Friday, we had a sad photo of the car being ripped apart in preparation for a trip to the scrap yard. Earlier, Brownstoner had reported that a 10-story building was going on the property. There have been long standing reports of deep acrimony over development of the property. One GL reader noted, interestingly, that the SEPTA car was supposed to go to Lancaster, Pa to be put back in service rather than being cut up as scrap. Our reader writes: “This car was supposed to join its sisters in Lancaster PA for continued service. As seen in other Brownstoner posts earlier this month, the heated legal disputes between the parties involved appear to have cost 2739 its life. Similar situation to the eleven BNY trolleys that were scrapped by the city in 2005.” Another reader writes, generally, of refurbishment of such old cars and brings up the ones in Red Hook behind the Fairway:

Any number of trolley car museums would have taken this car for restoration and use as an operating attraction. The PCC cars, first developed in Brooklyn in the 1930’s by the Brooklyn Rapid Transit (a division of the BMT Lines) trolley company, as a project to restore U. S. transit companies during the Depression, were the best streetcars ever designed in the history of electric rail transportation. They still serve in many U. S. and foreign cities (in modernized form), and are the prototype for the Light Rail Vehicles now being used on urban transit systems worldwide. It is a total disgrace that this former Philadelphia car, a city where similar rebuilt PCCs are operating today in revenue service, has been sent to the junkyard. Can the other cars over in Red Hook be saved? They were part of the Brooklyn Historic Railway project that folded a few years ago, and are sitting outside a warehouse on Van Brunt St.

We quite taken by the story, both because it represents the destruction of another quirky Brooklyn landmark, but because it could have clearly been saved if personal bitterness and the drive to develop hadn’t won the day.